The embodiments relate to coding standards, for example coding standards which classify entities in a complex hierarchical system for ease of reference. Such standards may refer to technical domains such as for example: diseases, drugs, products, services, natural phenomena, transport, research areas and production systems, to name but a few examples. There are many coding standards in existence, and often two or more apply to the same domain. These may be competing standards, and/or one may supersede the other. Alignment of two such standards has multiple applications in today's data-rich world for exporting facts between computer systems, for consumption by human experts or for updating databases.
One example is of the competing classifications for goods and services which co-exist. eCI@ss is currently the only ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission) compliant industry standard nationally and internationally. With its 41,000 product classes and about 17,000 properties, eCI@ss covers the majority of traded goods and services. Many industry standards (e.g. from the electronic industry, medical technology, construction engineering, paper industry/office technology) are looking for interoperability to realize the potentials of a cross-industry standard and eCI@ss is claimed to provide such interoperability.
A competing classification is UNSPSC (United Nations Standard Products and Services Code®) managed by GS1 US™ for the UN Development Programme (UNDP). UNSPSC is an open, global, multi-sector standard for efficient, accurate classification of products and services. It includes a five level hierarchical classification codeset, and enables expenditure analysis at different grouping levels. You can drill down or up to the codeset to see more or less detail as is necessary for business analysis.
Other coding systems include the European Union Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV), developed to facilitate the processing of invitations to tender published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) by means of a single classification system to describe the subject matter of public contracts; and GS1 (Global Standards One), which provides standards used in barcoding.
It would be useful to cross-reference these standards for products/services, especially where each standard is conceived separately and there is hence no direct correlation between classes and instances in the standards.
Another example is in the medical domain. Currently, in many clinical institutions, two international disease classification systems are widely used concurrently for historical reasons. For instance, it could be that different departments are in the transition process of migrating to the next version of World Health Organisation International Classification of Disease (ICD) system while there are large amount of legacy patient data still annotated with the old ICD system. The two systems currently in-use are version 9 (ICD9) and ICD10. Since it is likely that the two systems are used to provide diagnostic code to the same patients when they are visiting different departments of the hospital, alignment between ICD9/10 becomes necessary.
The alignment between two classification systems is, however, not straightforward, even if they are designed by the same standards body. For example, ICD10 is not backward compatible with the previous version. For instance, there are no laterality (side of the body) features in the ICD9 codes whereas the ICD10 presents laterality and captures the complexity of diseases in a much better way through the extensive combination codes. Such differences in semantics result in ambiguous alignment between the two versions. For instance, there are cases when an ICD10 code can be mapped to multiple ICD9 codes. Similarly, there are cases when one ICD9 code is refined into multiple ICD10 code for better classification. There are also obsolete ICD classification and newly introduced codes. All these make establishing alignment a difficult task. Other classification/coding standards which develop in the medical area share these difficulties.
It is desirable to align two coding systems referring to the same domain (or to overlapping domains).